THOSE AMERICAN BAGDADS. With the liberation of Baghdad, Iraq, comes the local-interest stories about the Bagdads in the United States, all of them spelled without the "h." That might have been part of a simplified spelling craze, as Richard Halliburton visits Bagdad, Iraq in his airplane named Flying Carpet. The Bagdad spelling is in my 1938 edition of The Book of Marvels; there is a 1984 reissue that turns up from time to time. (Sometime in our history there was a movement to simplify the spelling of town names. Most "burghs" became burgs. Pittsburgh is a notable exception to the rule.

There is a Bagdad in the desert, the Mojave desert to be precise. It's on the Santa Fe line east out of Barstow: you roll through Daggett where the Union Pacific to Las Vegas and Salt Lake diverges, then through empty country to Pisgah, where you descend into Ludlow, crest Ash Hill, and then pass through Klondike and Siberia (somebody had a perverse sense of humor) to Bagdad. East of Bagdad come stations that look like they came from a dispatcher's training manual: Amboy, Bolo, Cadiz, Danby, Essex, Fenner, Goffs, Homer, a Bannock intrudes, then Ibis, Java, and you've reached the state line at Needles.